September 7.

[Sidenote:  THE SOMME FRONT]

We have been for some time right up in parts quite destitute of houses and villages and shops.  All the remnants of villages here are ruins.  And messing is consequently more difficult.  So may I have a large-sized cake now and then?

The war isn’t over yet, I fear.  We live in the usual touch-and-go condition.

September 8.

Things hum.  Troops like ants all over the ground.  In tents, in bivvies, in the open, everywhere.  And the eternal chain of motor lorries bringing up ammunition and supplies.  These one sees all over France.  But here they block half the roads.  Well, yesterday morning I rode out alone with the Colonel and two orderlies.  We went to some high ground from which you can see it all, dismounted, and sent the horses back.  In front of us, in the valley, a wrecked town with the strangest thing on the still-standing tower.  I hope to make a picture of it if ever I can get any time again.

Later in the day from one of our O.P.’s I began a sketch of the whole panorama of the battle.  Desolate ragged country, torn with shell wounds; the poor scarecrow trees like arms stretched up to heaven for help.  Fields that once were golden with corn now grey and scarred with white trenches that look like a network of pale worms lying where they died.

Now, from another O.P.  I’m looking at the arid chaos below.  Arid and lonely-looking, but not silent.  A strafe is on.  Seems to be getting louder and more continuous.  We passed on our way here a great naval gun crashing out death to the burrowing Huns.  Swallow doesn’t like naval guns.

From flimsy net shelters flash the expensive guns, and the bombardment gathers strength, gathers volume, until you’d think something must burst—­the world or the universe:  either might split from end to end.  The dust and smoke are gradually making everything invisible.  Crumps come whistling and heaving up great clouds of heavy blackness.  We look at our watches.  Zero hour in five minutes.  The aeroplanes buzzing aloft, and the sausages sitting among the low clouds, inert and so vulnerable-looking.  Can there be anything left?  Can a single soul live?

[Illustration:  TRENCHES BETWEEN FRICOURT AND LA BOISELLE They don’t look much like trenches, because they were battered to pieces.  A ‘dump’ on the near horizon was hit by a Boche shell.  It blazed and crackled and smouldered all night, a drifting column of dull pink smoke.]

September 9.

Surely we shall get through.  Even in spite of the rain.  The rain has made the country into a quagmire.

Reconnoitred the front trenches to-day with the Colonel, in a particular part where everything is at sixes and sevens, and no one quite knows what we haven’t or have got.  Most odd.  Shells of all calibres bursting on every side—­corpses, odours unspeakable.

[Sidenote:  DELVILLE WOOD]